Ecological realities

In a 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, Walt Kelly's Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That doesn’t mean there are no differences in individuals’ contribution to those crises. Landowners, not agricultural workers who harvest crops, bear responsibility for chemical contamination of the soil. A fast-food restaurant cashier who has to drive to work and the CEO of an oil company cashing in on hydrocarbons are not equally culpable.

But how much are landowners’ choices constrained by economic realities outside their control? If all the energy companies stopped producing fossil fuels in the coming decades, would consumers happily embrace a major down-powering and the accompanying lifestyle changes? Kelly’s statement may have lacked nuance, but so do many of the environmentalists’ platitudes that ignore the depth of change necessary in both economic institutions and people’s expectations.

We assess people’s choices and understand that those with a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth and power are more of an enemy than the ‘us’ who lack such status. Those judgments are necessary, but not sufficient to deal with the multiple cascading ecological crises we face. Whatever our individual contributions to an unsustainable society, collectively we have to embrace down-powering in a dramatically different world, like it or not.

We use ‘crises’ deliberately, to focus not just on rapid climate disruption but soil erosion and degradation, chemical contamination, and a dramatic reduction in biodiversity. Climate change be the most compelling crisis, but all of these threats are a derivative of overshoot, of too many people consuming too much overall. We know that consumption is wildly skewed. We can focus on the worst offenders in the top 1 percent or top 10 percent, and at times that can be an effective strategy for incremental change. We shouldn't hesitate to go after people who own yachts.

But the larger problem is the routine expectations of people in the developed world more generally. Even if resources were equitably distributed, the ecosphere cannot sustain 8 billion people indefinitely at anything like the current level of aggregate consumption. Politicians of all stripes love to champion the middle class, but middle-class living is unsustainable. Eliminating disparities is the first step. What comes next?

It’s time to talk honestly about “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and materials. No current political formation – right, center, or left – embraces that goal. The right generally ignores ecological realities; the center argues for minor tweaks to the current system; and the left imagines that deeper democracy and some version of socialism will lead us to the promised land. All of those folks are betting on technological miracles to maintain, or even expand, an affluent society. This technological fundamentalism may well be the most dangerous fundamentalism. We are on the left side of the political fence, blunt in our criticism of capitalism, economic growth, and global disparities. But we recognize the danger of embracing the illusion that such things as renewable energy and electric vehicles will allow business as usual.

Excerpted: ‘Earth Day: Enemies and Opportunities’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org